A cluster of Australian engineering students at Swinburne University of Technology have invented a robot, named Ruby, that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in the world record time of 10 seconds.
Getting the puzzle solved in a robot poses two difficult problems: working out the solution really quickly, and having the robot move the …

The article does seem to completely ignore 'CubeStormer'.

Not the first

A couple of years back one of the engineers at ARM built a cube solving robot using Lego and a Nokia N95. It was not as fast as this, about 3 minutes, but it did show what you can do with a mobile phone.

Or the Short Circuit approach

Dismantle - Not faster

Dismantle ... reassemble is not faster if you have got a good cube-solving algorithm on board. You have to make less than twenty 90 degree twists of the appropriate face. Human cube-solving speed-freaks routinely break ten seconds. A computer can form the operation list in milliseconds or less, and the speed is determined by the robotics.

I think dismantle - reassemble will always take longer on the mechanical front for human or robot. It also requires a tool to prize out one of the side-centre pieces to start the dismantlement, especially if you don't want to add "pick it up from the floor on the other side of the room" to the algorithm!

Bah!

I used to use this trick all the time when the cube-nerds appeared in-theatre (and they always would when the damned things first came out).

cn: "Go on. Scramble it. I bet I can solve it in <n> seconds".

yt: " Okay" (Turns back to sniggering of cube-nerd, scrambles cube as per request, gives nearest side a half twist to align middle tile with corner of layer below, pops out tile with thumb and rotates it 180 degrees before replacing it and scrambles some more before handing unsolvable cube back to owner)

And the fun was seeing how many seconds it would take before the cube-nerd would twig.

2007; Japanese Robot

6 seconds

Do they throw the cube into an incinerator afterwards?

Well, that' s cool.

That's definitely cool.

How did they manage to assemble a team of engineering students large enough without most wandering off to more important callings like holidays, beer parties and significant others? A sociological mystery.

Impressive

That time given is actually wrong. They're measuring the time _including_ studying the cube before the solve. The Cubinator, as well as humans, have time to inspect before they start the timed solve (15 seconds for humans). The video for this machine included the inspection in the time - it didn't start twisting the cube till about 3 seconds in...